The sniping among Sky News presenters began just hours after it was confirmed Peta Credlin would be part of the line-up for the election campaign. The host of PM Live, Paul Murray, declared he was “stoked” Credlin had signed up because her insights would be “fascinating”. “Can’t wait!,” he squealed.
Fellow Abbott loyalist and Sky host Chris Kenny used the opportunity to say he would enjoy watching “those who had viciously sniped and bagged Peta Credlin go to water face-to-face on air”. Who was Kenny referring to? Surely not Sky colleague Peter van Onselen, co-author of Battle Ground: Why the Liberal Party Shirtfronted Tony Abbott? When PVO asked to whom he was referring Kenny quickly replied he was referring to Credlin’s nemesis Niki Savva rather than any of his colleagues.
Fairfax fighting (having a quality discussion) among themselves
Speaking of infighting, Fairfax Media is the scene of a civil war between CEO Greg Hywood and the very journalists he has targeted for massive redundancies. Keen to make his point heard, Hywood used his own opinion pages to “put to bed the myth” that laying off journalists “is some dire threat to quality journalism”.
In his piece, headlined Let’s have the quality discussion, Hywood reminisced about the good old days when you could find an ashtray, a telex machine and a newspaper clippings library in the newspaper offices of Fairfax.
“Currently across the Herald, the Age and the Financial Review, Fairfax Media employs in excess of 520 reporters and more than 700 journalists in total,” Hywood wrote, the week after the company announced plans to lose 120 journalists or one in five.
Not content with infuriating the journos he now employs, Hywood managed to insult the journalists of decades past by saying much of what they wrote in the good old days was clickbait too – to fill the space between the ads. “Some of what was produced to fill those enormous Saturday papers could not qualify under any definition of ‘quality journalism’,” Hywood wrote. “It was the ‘clickbait’ of its time.”
Union representatives Marcus Strom, Leigh Tonkin, Anne Davies, Gina McColl, Simon Johanson and Miki Perkins were quick to reply, posting an open letter on the MEAA website: “We’ve changed a lot in the past 40 years. Management needs to keep up. Old school thinking and nostalgia won’t cut it in the new media landscape. Talk to us, Greg. Together, we know the new media landscape better than anyone and want Fairfax Media to be a thriving, diversified company that values quality journalism.”
The announcement today that the Canberra Times will cut 12 jobs and move from broadsheet to a tabloid size is likely to further anger staff and the union. The move, which takes place three years after the rest of the Fairfax metropolitan papers, leaves the Australian as the only remaining daily broadsheet.
Fairfax executive Rod Quinn talked up the change on Thursday, saying the new “compact” size would be “easier to handle and navigate” than the present broadsheet.
“The Canberra Times is changing to a more convenient shape but it will continue to deliver the same quality, independent journalism and agenda-setting local news coverage that has earned the respect and trust of Canberra readers for 90 years,” Quinn said.
It is understood that the 12 positions to be cut are mainly journalists.
Nielsen changes push Guardian to fifth spot
It may be several months late but IAB Australia and Nielsen have finally launched new cross-platform measurement metrics – called Nielsen Digital Ratings Monthly – which provide an independent, cross-device view of the total digital audience unduplicated, across PC, smartphone and tablet for both web browsers and apps.
The data shows there are 19.6m digital users, the majority on smartphones. It’s no surprise that Google, Facebook and YouTube have the biggest share of the market. In the news category, the inclusion of mobile devices has brought some good news for some players. News Corp’s the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph have been pushed into the top 10 for the first time now that mobile use is included. Also benefiting from the update is Guardian Australia, which has been boosted from seventh to fifth spot in the news rankings, behind news.com.au, smh.com.au, ABC news websites and ninemsn.com.
ABC’s Scott is ‘blind to bias’, says Bolt
Andrew Bolt was most perturbed by Mark Scott’s interview on MediaWatch on Monday, calling it “bizarre” and saying Scott was blind to the ABC’s “unlawful and dangerous leftist bias”.
Scott may have annoyed Bolt when he said the ABC practised journalism: “We do a different style of journalism to the journalism that I think increasingly you see in News [Corp] papers and increasingly you see with different columnists as well.”
Bolt claimed that the only non-leftists working at Aunty – Tom Switzer and Amanda Vanstone – were “exiled” to Radio National and Switzer was “banned from speaking on anything but foreign affairs”. Weekly Beast was alarmed so we asked Switzer who at the ABC had banned him. “I’ve never been banned from speaking on anything but foreign affairs,” Switzer told us, detailing segments he had done on domestic politics. Switzer said there was “some internal blowback” after a controversial segment with climate sceptic Lord Lawson last winter but he was “very happy at RN”.
Liberal MP Dennis Jensen proves truth is stranger than fiction
The Australian’s Western Australia reporter Andrew Burrell had a juicy story on Thursday about Liberal MP Dennis Jensen which is more than a little embarrassing for someone who is backed by the Christian right. Burrell revealed that Dr Jensen has written a novel about a fictional war between Australia and a coalition of Indonesia and China and he secretly used his parliamentary letterhead to look for a publisher for his book, The Sky Warriors.
For a member of parliament’s joint standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade, the subject matter is more than a little questionable but the book also includes passages which can only be described as soft pornography. Dr Jensen writes about a woman with breasts “as firm as they had been in her late teens” who moans as her married lover gropes “her inner thigh until he felt the warm wetness with his hand”.
“She pulled his trousers off, ripped the underpants off excitedly, and took him in her mouth,” Jensen writes. “Rono massaged her small, soft brown breasts, luxuriating in the silky complexion of the skin.” Asked about the book on 720 ABC Perth, Jensen said it was “really interesting” the years-old letter had been leaked just before his preselection. And the sex scene? Well, it was his dad’s fault.
“Basically, the reason for the racy section in the first place is my dad is a journalist and also has written a couple of novels, and he was told by publishers that you needed to have at least one racy scene in the book, so that’s why I included it,” Dr Jensen told the ABC.
